Apparently, women on the job greatly underestimate their bosses’ opinion of their work. That’s the word from a new study out of the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management.

Scott Taylor, the study’s author, found that men tend to assume their bosses think more highly of them than they actually do. For women, on the other hand, the reverse is true. According to Taylor, the difference between how they predicted their bosses rated them and their actual ratings was three times greater for women than for men:

What accounts for these results? “The most obvious answer, lack of confidence, can easily be ruled out,” Prof. Taylor says. “How do we know? Women rated themselves just as highly as men rated themselves, an encouraging development from the norm of two or three decades ago.”

Closer to the answer, he thinks, is that “women are so accustomed to decades of being ‘disappeared’ and hearing histories of women whose contributions went unnoticed that they assume these conditions exist to the same extent today. As a result, women in our sample predicted others would not notice their work, when in reality others rated them higher than men on a whole range of emotional and social competencies basic to leadership.”

That women are rated higher than they think — that’s encouraging. But nonetheless, when that inner voice tells you that, no matter what you think of yourself, you’re underappreciated at best — and wearing the invisible cloak at worst — does it hamper your performance on the job? Tear into your job satisfaction? And is that just one more reason why for women, the workplace structure is more difficult to navigate?

Maybe we can’t get over that feeling that we’re always being judged. Or maybe it’s because we were never socialized to slay the dragon. But I also wonder if one explanation might be the differences in the ways women learn to communicate. According to Santa Clara University Communication Professor Laura Ellingson, Ph.D., a scholar in gendered communication, research shows that women are more tuned into other people’s expressions and underlying meanings when they communicate. In other words, they take in much more information, do a lot more processing, and search for a lot of signals — Is my boss pleased? Does my boss expect me to do this or that? — that may or may not be relevant.

All of which not only makes decision-making more difficult but may also account for the reason why we are always feeling judged. And why we may in fact, as this study shows, misread the cues.

The moral of the story? Can’t say, other than this: if you think you deserve a raise? You probably do. Go in and ask for it.

Meanwhile, speaking of women at work, one more brick in the wall: Surely by now you have heard about the insulting question asked of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and her response, when in the Congo on Monday, and the ridiculous media flurry that followed. Here’s a comment from tk on Shannon’s last post to put this all in perspective:

I am a male, and I proudly call myself a feminist. At 62 I have lived through the entire “feminist” movement, but all it takes to remind me of what a great distance still has to be travelled is one question to Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State (for God’s sake), about policy: What does your husband think about this?